Here is a copy of the e-mail sent to all active clients:
With all that has happened in the past few weeks and everything that is in the works, we have put together an e-mail to keep you informed.
Pro-rated Billing
As we mentioned in a previous announcement, we will begin switching current clients over to pro-rated billing in the next few weeks. This change will only impact clients paying quarterly, semi-annually, and annually at this time. We will be setting the due date for all clients affected by this to the 1st of the month of their next due date (i.e. January 1st if you are due January 31st) and credit your account the difference. For the next invoice you will still have use of your service until 1 day after your old due date just in case you have budgeted your next payment for that date or have a payment already scheduled.
If you have a Paypal Subscription please update your subscription details to avoid disruption of service or double payments.
If this change causes any financial conflicts please open a ticket with our Billing department and we will work with you to fit your needs. If you are a monthly client and would like to switch to pro-rated billing for your current services, you can also open a ticket with our Billing department and we can do this on a per user basis although all request will only be processed once all of the clients on a quarterly, semi-annually, and annually billing cycle are updated.
This new change will take effect January 2013 so clients with invoices due this month will not be impacted.
12/13/2012 Outage
We want to apologize for this extended outage caused by a determined attacker against one of our clients. We are working on steps to prevent such instances from happening again in the future. More details of this outage can be found here: https://my.securedragon.net/announcements.php?id=239
DDOS Protected IPs
After the outage mentioned above, we have disabled the option to purchase this service as an addon for now. We have plans to implement the DDOS Protection but not as an addon service. Our plan is to offer DDOS Protected VPSs in order to prevent Protected VPSs from obtaining an IP address on our normal network. We hope to further separate the VPSs as much as possible to prevent collateral damage against other clients. At this time we will continue supporting those clients who have purchased the DDOS Protection as an addon but we will be removing the non-protected IPs in the near future from all of those VPSs (we will be contacting those individuals via ticket).
These changes will not impact our cPanel Shared Hosting clients and are only for our VPS services.
Premium VPSs
Currently we only offer OpenVZ plans up to 512MB of RAM which has been our target market since the beginning and has worked out perfectly for the majority of our clients because it keeps the costs down, the stability high, and the performance consistent. Well with our recent server updates we also acquired some more servers specifically for OpenVZ nodes and will be building one of them specifically for a new level of VPS for those clients who need more than our current budget VPS offering. Our new Premium VPSs will range from 512MB-6GB of RAM (w/ equal vSwap), 1-8 CPU cores, 50-400GB of RAID10 disk space, and 500GB-4TB of bandwidth. We expect to have more details for all of you by January.
Backup VPSs
During our trip to the data center last week we brought along a brand new Backup VPS node that will be replacing our current gold01 server with more than 2x the capacity and 4 times the performance. We have been syncing the current data from gold01 to the new server (gold02) and will continue syncing up the data until the end of December when we plan on shipping it to our second location that we are setting up. Once the new server is online in the new data center, we will turn off gold01 and open up stock for our Backup VPS plans. Current Backup VPS clients will be contacted via an e-mail with more details about the migration and what to expect (including new IPs).
Second Location
Yes, we are getting closer and closer to our second location! We are still in the process of working everything out but, as we said above, we are planning on shipping our first server there in January so it's not that far off. We have decided that our next location will be in Denver, CO at Handy Networks LLC. The location decision was based primarily on Joe relocating there next April so we will have a person available in both Tampa and Denver to perform hands on work. In the beginning we will start with just our Backup VPS nodes and some VPN servers, but plan to add more servers as Joe gets situated. Our primary focus for Tampa will be our OpenVZ and KVM VPSs while our primary focus in Denver will be our Backup VPSs. Our cPanel and VPN services will be about equal in both locations.
Websites
While we have worked hard to build a very durable cluster for our primary website (SecureDragon.net), the recent outage has shown us that DNS caching appears to be our enemy in this regards with some clients still unable to see our website during the outage. Internal testing showed this was less than 40% but still more than enough for us to work on making it better. We are still discussing possible options for this but at this point in time we are planning on moving our Client Area outside of our network (or at least replicating it to a failover location).
Just a reminder that our CONTACT@ e-mail address always works because it is hosted externally from all of our servers as is our http://drgn.biz website. Lastly, you can turn to our Twitter (@SecureDragonLLC) for information but this is mostly used for pulling from our RSS feeds (although in an emergency or critical unscheduled maintenance we will utilize it).
-The Secure Dragon Staff
Lørdag, Desember 15, 2012
